In response to the violence in Afghanistan today regarding the Quran burning by Terry Jones I, on behalf of the Ministry of the Dead, would like to state that violence of any form, along with religious bigotry undermine the unifying love of God or, as we in ministry refer to it, the universe. The blatant disregard for sacred objects, such as holy books, and the violence that may follow when one desecrates something held in high regard by a group of people, is not a justification for the act in and of itself. If we can learn anything from this debacle it is that the religious ideologies that lead people to justify burning religious books or acts of violence are despicable and display our inability to transcend dogmas as old as the Middle Ages. As Terrence Mckenna has stated, "I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking." and that, “”Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
Let us step back from these atrocities and examine not only the root cause of religious intolerance, which is doctrine and dogma, which we in the Ministry see as the sole provocation of men, not of God or the Universe and reach out to one another across the imaginary lines that separate and marginalize humanity, and prevent the unification of the individual mind, body and spirit of each human being into what Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as the “Over-soul” of humanity.
“The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart.”
From the Over-soul an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson
